Customer Relationship Management Is the Lifeblood of the Business

Customer relationship management has to do with everything that businesses or organizations do to build healthy relationships with their customers. The Business Ball (2012, p. web) notes that “customer relationship management concerns the relationship between the organization and its customers.” Through customer relationship management, the customer is put at the head of the organization and accorded the accolade of the lifeblood of the company and therefore the need to be particular and concerned with his or her every need. To this effect, the Business Ball (2012, p. web) admonishes that “customers are the lifeblood of any organization be it a global corporation with thousands of employees and a multi-billion turnover, or a sole trader with a handful of regular customers.”

This means that customer relationship management is not the sole research of the world’s largest corporations but every business setup; no matter how small it is. In talking about customer relationship management, one important composition to dwell much on is management. McCrimmon (2012, p. web) explains management as “achieving goals in a way that makes the best use of all resources.” From this definition, we get the idea that in customer relationship management, customers are seen as a means in helping us achieve set goals. In doing this however, we must be in a position to use available resources, no matter how scanty it may be.

In time past, the task of managing customer relationship was manipulated sorely by human effort with the aid of resources such as financial capital. Today, customer relationship management has taken a new twist whereby human efforts have been minimized considerably due to the introduction of technology. Technology has been incorporated to create what is known today as customer relationship management system. Customer relationship management system does not eliminate the task of the human resource entirely but makes his work generally easier and well catered for by fusing it with both simple and complex technology.

Blacharski (2011, p. 125) explains a typical scenario of how customer relationship system works in an organization by stating that “all departments within a corporation have at least some indirect access to customers, or customer information; the goal of CRM is to collect that information in a central repository, analyze it, and make it available to all departments.” Customer relationship management system has been found to be very useful in organizational management as compared to the manual way of doing things Frimpong (2004, p. 43).

There is however the challenge for customer relationship management systems to be advanced and improved further. Though what businesses receive out of the system today may be satisfying to a large extent, business should still be tasked to advance their access to the system as technology in itself keeps advancing by the day.